5 ms·

Yes, that's fair. Sure, today we have grid and vanilla CSS is sane and useable by anyone who takes the time to learn the modern way of doing things. But let's

Yes, that's fair. Sure, today we have grid and vanilla CSS is sane and useable by anyone who takes the time to learn the modern way of doing things. But let's not forget what a long and tortured road CSS has taken to become what it is today. CSS was a total dumpster fire up until around when flexbox came out. It was SO HARD to make it do what you want for SO LONG. The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades. Yet, the grid concept has been around in application layout since the 1980's. I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time, and the explanations I've heard don't seem plausible to me. It's understandable that folks who were around in the bad days of CSS are still kind of bitter. I was, and if I didn't take the time to see the new ways of using it, I would still be incredulous about CSS.

afavour 2y ago
> I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time It is weird to look back on but the web platform essentially went through a dark ages for a while. You could say the same about why it took us so long to get to ES6 JS, too. The standards bodies were frozen in ice (and I don’t quite know why either), everyone was debating HTML5 vs XHTML and somehow the rest of the platform floundered for years.
- marksbrown 2y ago
  Microsoft failed to capture the internet. IE6 can still cause sane minds to crack.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bazoom42 2y ago
> The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades This is not true. CSS have had ‘display:table’ for 25 years, which is a simple grid layout model equivalent to html tables. Content can be aligned in rows and columns. ‘Display:grid’ is much more powerful of course.
- crispyambulance 2y ago
  Yeah, I remember those. It was intended as a way to make "tables" using divs. That way, we could pretend to do page layout with CSS, while still feeling shitty about repurposing something meant for tables. There's just no justifiable reason for putting whole-page lay-out on the back-burner for so long. So many other far less important things came out before grid, it feels almost like it was deliberately spiteful to delay it so long.
  - bazoom42 2y ago
    Why would you feel shitty about using ‘display:table’? It puts things into a freaking grid as you asked for.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      There was a huge cargo cult adamantly against using tables back in the day, even though the "true way" of hacking divs with float and clearfixes and invisible images was totally broken. Somehow having bunch of wrapper and empty divs was "more semantic" or something. I was in the cult. It was totally inane, but seems to carry some effects to this day.
      - bazoom42 2y ago
        The movement was against using html table markup (<table>, <tr> etc.) for layout because of the accessibility issues. It was not against the CSS display:table since that does not affect accessibility.
        jampekka 2y ago
        IE didn't support display:table until version 8.
    - crispyambulance 2y ago
      For a long time, css was a huge step backwards from what we were accustomed to with desktop application layout mechanisms. Web-apps were "a thing" starting in the very early naughts, yet just getting stuff to stick where you wanted it on web page required a bunch of stupid hacks and accommodations. Of course people resorted to using tables for page layout. The display:table thing was just a continuation of that. Whole-page layout should have been an absolute top priority for the folks that controlled css, yet it seems they just didn't care until grid finally came out in 2017-ish? I just don't understand why that is.

afavour 2y ago

> I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time It is weird to look back on but the web platform essentially went through a dark ages for a while. You could say the same about why it took us so long to get to ES6 JS, too. The standards bodies were frozen in ice (and I don’t quite know why either), everyone was debating HTML5 vs XHTML and somehow the rest of the platform floundered for years.

marksbrown 2y ago
Microsoft failed to capture the internet. IE6 can still cause sane minds to crack.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bazoom42 2y ago

> The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades This is not true. CSS have had ‘display:table’ for 25 years, which is a simple grid layout model equivalent to html tables. Content can be aligned in rows and columns. ‘Display:grid’ is much more powerful of course.

crispyambulance 2y ago
Yeah, I remember those. It was intended as a way to make "tables" using divs. That way, we could pretend to do page layout with CSS, while still feeling shitty about repurposing something meant for tables. There's just no justifiable reason for putting whole-page lay-out on the back-burner for so long. So many other far less important things came out before grid, it feels almost like it was deliberately spiteful to delay it so long.
- bazoom42 2y ago
  Why would you feel shitty about using ‘display:table’? It puts things into a freaking grid as you asked for.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    There was a huge cargo cult adamantly against using tables back in the day, even though the "true way" of hacking divs with float and clearfixes and invisible images was totally broken. Somehow having bunch of wrapper and empty divs was "more semantic" or something. I was in the cult. It was totally inane, but seems to carry some effects to this day.
    - bazoom42 2y ago
      The movement was against using html table markup (<table>, <tr> etc.) for layout because of the accessibility issues. It was not against the CSS display:table since that does not affect accessibility.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        IE didn't support display:table until version 8.
  - crispyambulance 2y ago
    For a long time, css was a huge step backwards from what we were accustomed to with desktop application layout mechanisms. Web-apps were "a thing" starting in the very early naughts, yet just getting stuff to stick where you wanted it on web page required a bunch of stupid hacks and accommodations. Of course people resorted to using tables for page layout. The display:table thing was just a continuation of that. Whole-page layout should have been an absolute top priority for the folks that controlled css, yet it seems they just didn't care until grid finally came out in 2017-ish? I just don't understand why that is.